This invention relates to analytical devices and methods for the detection of microorganisms which produce low-molecular-weight metabolites.
As disclosed by J. L. Firmin et al., "The Biochemical Pathway for the Breakdown of Methyl Cyanide (Acetonitrile) in Bacteria" Biochemical Journal., Vol 158 (1976), pp. 223-229, it is known that metabolites formed in a microbiological or biochemical process can be detected as follows: a radioactively labeled substance is admixed to a cell suspension; the mixture is incubated for a certain time; the cells are removed; and a radioactively labeled metabolite is detected, e.g., by liquid-phase scintillation measurement. This widely used detection method is complicated and time consuming. Moreover, as radioactively labeled metabolites are detected independent of their molecular weight, this method is unsuited for the selective detection of microorganisms with specific metabolic performance.
Disclosed in published European patent application, EP-A 124 285, is a detection method for microorganisms in medical test samples. This method, too, suffers from the drawback of registering the totality of radioactively labeled metabolites, making it unsuited as a method for screening metabolites produced by specific microorganisms.